After a long, tedious week I managed to beat the campaign at the very last minute. Since I am one of the only owners of this game for Geeksquisite I thought it would be appropriate to share my thoughts on the game.
Campaign: Many have said this campaign was short, but it isn't as short as it seems. it's a good 5 hours if you play it on Normal, but I found it hilarious how most considered it short and finished it quick; but on easy. To me that is unrealistic and because most will play it on Heroic, it will be enough to satisfy Halo fans. You really become aware of how vunerable you are, it feels close to Halo: Combat Evolved in terms of health and shields(No Sexy AI voice included). The cutscenes are numerous, some being unnecessary, others being fun to watch several times with buddies of mine in Co Op. However one gripe I had was the flashbacks the Rookie had to find, you basically went back and forth in the city. Stupid. The city is also pretty dark alot of the time, but in the buildings it's annoyingly dark and not even the nightvision in the visor helps enough. So at times you are groping to find your way in the buildings, as for the Visor feature it's pretty cool but OH MY GOD does it have to run the tutorial every time you start at the beginning. You can't end the tutorial right away, that was so annoying. Overall the campaign was nicely varied in terms of combat and "missions", it showed a good amount of what marines have to do since Master Chief isn't around.
Maps: Yeah I had them all already except for the three specifically in ODST, they're nothing to go crazy over. Longshore is a medium to large map that's designed pretty badly to be honest, it's too easy to navigate the whole map in 2 minutes. Citadel is slightly better than my low expectations of it, could be real fun for juggernaut if there are enough nooks and crannies to hide in. Heretic is a carbon copy of Midship, which is good because that map was good, it's just graphically updated. The Maps don't really add any value.
Firefight: Easily the best part of ODST, I spent 3 hours trying to stay alive with two friends of mine. You really start to engage in guerilla warfare when your ammo starts to run out, and you do run out of ammo before like level 3. The Drones are your worst enemy, not only are they able to pick you up (i'm serious, they do) but they also have a variation of themselves in red with shields. The ones with shields are the priority to take down, you can't let them surround you. The Firefight maps are pretty big, some are bigger than the multiplayer maps (Why is that?)and it's a real challenge to fight with melees when your weapons really run out of ammo. The bonus rounds where grunts are the only enemies is frustrating as hell, because it becomes a plasma grenade acid rain shower, those grunts are suicidal almost 70 percent of the time normally. But they are next to impossible to score more than 20 of them before you get stuck, although the worst enemies to fight are invunerable brutes with hammers and fuel rod guns. The crazy part is sometimes those come in threes, that's right three invunerable Brutes with hammers and fuel rod guns. Your going to lose a couple of lives.
Overall Halo ODST will stand alone, it's worth the buy for what it has. But if you need a reason to buy it, buy it for firefight. It's tons better than Horde Mode and I am unsure if Halo Reach will have it. If it does, it's still a more fun challenge to do it as an ODST.
You know you want the Beta Code, I can't wait for that.
This game gets a 4 out of 5 from me.
